Sacrament

CHAPTER IV

i

Arianna came to visit, unannounced, the morning after he got back nto the city. Brought a pound of French Roast from the Castro Cheesery and zuccotto and St Honore's cake from Peverelli's in North Beach, where she'd now moved in with Glenn. They hugged and kissed in the hallway, both a little teary-eyed at the reunion.

'Lord, I've missed you,' Will told her, his hands cupping her face. 'And you look so fine.'

'I dyed my hair. No more grey. I will have this hair colour at a hundred and one. Now what about you?'

'I'm better every day,' Will said, heading through to the kitchen to brew some coffee. 'I still creak a bit when I get up in the morning, and the scars itch like buggery after I've had a shower, but otherwise I'm back in working order.'

'I had my doubts. So did Bernie.'

'You thought I might just slip away quietly?'

'It crossed my mind. You looked very peaceful. I asked Bernie if you were dreaming. He said he didn't know.'

'It wasn't like dreaming, it was like going back in time. Being a boy again.'

'Was that fun?'

He shook his head. 'I'm very happy to be back.'

'You've got a great place to come back to,' she said, wandering to the kitchen door and surveying the hallway. She'd always loved the house; more than Will, in truth. The size of the place, along with the intricacy of the layout (not to mention the excesses its stylishly underfurnished rooms had hosted) lent it a certain authority, she thought. Most of the houses in the neighbourhood had seen their share of priapics, of course, but it wasn't just high times that haunted the boards here. It was a host of other things: Will's rages when he couldn't make the connections, and his howls of revelation when he did; the din of excited conversation around maps which had upon them an exhilarating paucity of roads; evenings of debate on the devolution of certainty and drunken ruminations on fate and death and love. There were finer houses in the city, to be sure; but none, she'd be willing to bet, more marinated in midnight profundities than this.

'I feel like a burglar,' Will said, pouring coffee for them both. 'Like I broke into somebody's apartment and I'm living their life for them.'

'You'll get back into the groove after a few days,' Adrianna said, taking her coffee and wandering through to the large file-room where Will always laid out his pictures. The length of one wall was a noticeboard, on which over the years he'd pinned up exposure or printing errors that had caught his eye; pictures too dark or burned out to be useful, but which he nevertheless found intriguing. His consumptives, he called these unhealthy pictures, and had more than once observed, usually in his cups, that this was what he saw when he imagined how the world would end. Blurred or indecipherable forms in a grainy gloom, all purpose and particularity gone.

She perused them idly while she sipped her coffee. Many of the photographs had been up on the wall for years, their unfixed images decaying further in the light.

'Are you ever going to do anything with these?' she said.

'Like burn them, you mean?' he said, coming to stand beside her.

'No, like publishing them.'

'They're fuck-ups, Adie.'

'That'd be the point.'

'A deconstructionist wildlife book?'

'I think it'd attract a lot of attention.'

'Fuck the attention,' Will said. 'I've had all the attention I ever want. I've said Look what I did, Daddy to the whole wide world and my ego is now officially at peace.' He went to the board and started to pull the pictures down, the pins flying.

'Hey, be careful, you'll tear them!'

'So?' he said, chucking the pictures down. `You know what? This feels good!' The floor was rapidly littered with photographs. 'That's more like it,' he said, stepping back to admire the now empty wall.

'Can I have one for a souvenir?'

`One.'

She wandered amongst the scattered pictures, looking for one that caught her fancy. Stooping, she picked up an old and much-stained photograph.

'What did you choose?' he said. 'Show me.'

She turned it to him. It resembled a nineteenth-century spiritualist picture; those pale blurs of ectoplasm in which believers had detected the forms of the dead. Will named its origins instantly.

'Begemder Province, Ethiopia. It's a walia ibex.'

Adrianna flipped the photograph over to look at it again.

'How the hell do you know that?'

Will smiled. 'I never forget a face,' he said.

ii

The following day he went to visit Patrick, in his apartment up at the top of Castro. Though the pair had lived together on Sanchez Street for almost four of their six years together, Patrick had never given up the apartment, nor had Will ever pressured him to do so. The house, in its spare, functional way, was an expression of Will's undecorative nature. The apartment, by contrast, was so much a part of who Patrick was warm, exuberant, enveloping - that to have given it up would have been tantamount to losing a limb. There at the top of the hill he had spent most of the money he earned in the city below (where he had been until recently an investment banker) creating a retreat from the city, where he and a few chosen lotus-eaters could watch the fog come and go. He was a big, broad handsome man, his Greek heritage as evident in his features as the Irish: heavy-lidded and laden eyes, a thug of a nose, a generous mouth beneath a fat black moustache. In a suit, he looked like somebody's bodyguard; in drag at Mardi Gras, like a fundamentalist's nightmare; in leather, sublime.

Today, when Rafael (who had apparently recanted and come home) escorted Will into the living-room he found Patrick sitting at the window dressed in a baggy T-shirt and draw-string linen pants. He looked well. His hair was cropped to a greying crew-cut, and he wasn't as beefy as he'd been, but his embrace was as powerful as ever.

'Lord, look at you,' he said, standing back from Will to appreciate him. 'You're finally starting to look like your photograph.' (This was a back-handed compliment, and an on-going joke, begun when Will had chosen an unflattering jacket photograph for his second book on the grounds that it made him look more authoritative.) 'Come and sit down,' he said, gesturing to the chair that had been put opposite his in the window. 'Where the hell's Rafael gone? You want some tea?'

'No, I'm fine. Is he looking after you okay?'

'We're doing better,' Patrick said, easing back into his own chair. Only now, in the tentativeness of this manoeuvre, did Will get a sense of his delicacy. 'We argue, you know-'

'So I heard.'

'From Adrianna?'

'Yeah, she said-'

'I tell her the juicy bits,' Patrick said. 'She doesn't get to hear about what a sweetheart he is most of the time. Anyway, I have so many angels watching over me it's embarrassing.'

Will looked back down the length of the room. 'You've got some new things,' he said.

'I inherited some heirlooms from dead queens,' he said. 'Though most of it doesn't mean much if you don't know the story that goes with it, which is kinda sad, because when I'm gone, nobody will know.'

'Rafael isn't interested?'

Patrick shook his head. 'It's old men's talk as far as he's concerned. That little table's got the strangest origins. It was made by Chris Powell. You remember Chris?'

'The Fix-it man with the beautiful butt.'

'Yeah. He died last year, and when they went in his garage they found he'd been doing all this carpentry. Making chairs and tables and rockinghorses.'

'Commissions?'

'Apparently not. He was just making them in his spare time, for his own satisfaction.'

'And keeping them?'

'Yeah. Designing them, carving them, painting them, and leaving them all locked up in his garage.'

'Did he have a lover?'

'A blue-collar honey like that, are ya kidding? He'd had hundreds.' Before Will could protest, Patrick said: 'I know what you're asking and no, he didn't have anyone permanent. It was his sister found all this beautiful work when she was cleaning out his house. Anyway, she asked me around to see if I wanted something to remember him by, and of course I said yes. I really wanted a rocking-horse, but I didn't have the balls to ask. She was a rather prim little soul, from somewhere in Idaho. Obviously the last thing she wanted to be doing was going through her cute fag brother's belongings. God knows what she found under the bed. Can you imagine?' He gazed out towards the city-scape. 'I've heard it happen so often now. Parents coming to see where their baby ran away to live, because now he's dying, and of course they find Queer City, the only surviving phallocracy.' He mused a moment. 'What must it be like for those people? I mean we do stuff in broad daylight here they haven't even invented in Idaho.'

'You think so?'

'Well, you think back to Manchester, or, what was the place in Yorkshire?'

'Burnt Yarley?'

'Wonderful. Yeah. Burnt Yarley. You were the only queer in Burnt Yarley, right? And you left as soon as you could. We all leave. We leave so we can feel at home.'

'Do you feel at home?'

'Right from the very first day. I walked along Folsom and I thought: this is where I want to be. Then I went into The Slot and got picked up by Jack Fisher.'

'You did not,' Will said. 'You met Jack Fisher with me, at that art show in Berkeley.'

'Shit! I cannot lie to you, can I?'

'No, you can lie,' Will said magnanimously, 'I just won't believe you. Which reminds me, Adrianna thought your father

-was dead. Yeah. Yeah. She gave me hell. Thanks very much.' He pursed his lips. 'I'm beginning to have second thoughts about this party,' he groused. 'If you're going to go around telling the truth to everyone I'm going to have a shit time; and I know the party's for you, but if I'm not having fun then nobody's going to have fun

'Oh we can't have that. How about I promise not to contradict anything you've said to anybody as long as it's not a personal defamation?'

'Will. I could never defame you,' Patrick said, with heavily feigned sincerity, 'I might tell everyone you're a no-good egotistic sonofabitch who walked out on me. But defame you, the love of my life? Perish the thought.' Performance over, he leaned forward and laid his hands on Will's knees. 'We went through this phase, remember? Well at least I did - when we thought we were going to be the first queers in history never to get old? No, that's not true. Maybe we'd get old, but very, very slowly so that by the time we were sixty we could still pass for thirty-two in a good light? It's all in the bones; that's what Jack says. But black guys look good any age so he doesn't count.'

'Do you have a point?' Will smiled.

'Yes. Us. Sitting here looking like two guys the world has not used kindly.'

'I never-'

'I know what you're going to say: you never think about it. Well you wait till you go out cruising. You're going to find a lot of little muscle-boys wanting to call you Daddy. I speak from experience. I think it must be a gay rite of passage. Straights feel old when they send their kids off to college. Queens feel old when one of those college kids comes up to them in a bar and tells them he wants to be spanked. Speaking of which-'

'Spanking or college-boys?'

'Straights.'

'Oh.'

'Adrianna's going to bring Glenn on Saturday, and you mustn't laugh but he's had his ears pinned back surgically, and it makes him look weird. I never noticed before, but he's got a kind of pointy head. I think the protruding ears were a distraction. So, no laughing.'

'I won't laugh,' Will assured him, perfectly certain Patrick was only telling him for mischief's sake. 'Is there anything you want me to do for Saturday?'

'Just turn up and be yourself.'

'That I can do,' he said. 'Okay. I'm on my way.' He leaned over and kissed Patrick lightly on the lips.

'You can see yourself out?'

'Blindfolded.'

'Will you tell Rafael it's pill-time? He'll be in his bedroom on the telephone.'

Patrick had it right. Rafael was sprawled on his bed with the telephone glued to his ear, talking in Spanish. Seeing Will at the door he sat upright, blushing.

'Sorry-' Will said -the door was open.'

'Yeah, yeah, it was just a friend, you know?' Rafael said.

'Patrick said it's pill-time.'

'I know,' Rafael replied. 'I'm coming. I just got to finish with my friend.'

'I'll leave you two alone,' Will said. Before he'd even closed the door Will heard Rafael picking up the thread of his sex-talk while it was still warm. Will went back to the living-room to tell Patrick the message had been delivered, but in the minute or so since his departure Patrick had fallen asleep, and was snoring softly in his chair. The wash of late afternoon light softened his features, but there was no erasing the toll of years and grief and sickness. If being called Daddy was a rite of passage, Will thought, so's this: looking in on a man I fell in love with in another life, and knowing that there was love there still, as plentiful as ever, but changed by time and circumstance into something more elusive.

He would gladly have watched Patrick a while longer, calmed by the familiarity of his face, but he didn't want to be hanging around when Rafael emerged, so he left the sleeper to his slumbers and headed off out of the apartment, down the stairs and into the street.

Why, he wondered, when there'd probably been more literary ink spilled on the subject of love than any other - including freedom, death and God Almighty -could he not begin to grasp the complexities of what he felt for Patrick? There were many scars there, on both sides; cruel things said and done in anger and frustration. There were petty betrayals and desertions, again, on both sides. There were shared memories of wild sex and domestic high finks and times of loving lucidity, when a glance or a touch or a certain song had been nirvana. And then there was now; feelings extricated from the past, but being woven into patterns neither of them had anticipated. Oh, they'd known they'd grow old, whatever Patrick remembered. They'd talked, half jokingly, about withering into happy alcoholics in Key West, or moving to Tuscany and owning an olive grove. What they'd never talked about because it had not seemed likely, was that they would be in here, in the middle of their lives, and talking like old men: remembering their dead peers and watching the clock until it was time for pills.